INTRODUCTION

Distribution of Gypsies.

Asia has untold thousands of these wanderers, in Anatolia, Syria, Armenia, Persia, Turkestan, and Siberia, perhaps also India and China; so, too, has Africa, in Egypt, Algeria, Darfûr, and Kordofan. We find them in both the Americas, from Pictou in Canada to Rio in Brazil; nor are New Zealand and Australia without at least their isolated bands.

Appearance in West.

Late in 1417 a band of ‘Secani’ or Tsigans, 300 in number, besides children and infants, arrived in Germany ‘from Eastern parts’ or ‘from Tartary.’ Their presence is first recorded at Lüneburg; and thence they passed on to Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, and Greifswald. At their head rode a duke and a count, richly dressed, with silver belts, and leading like nobles dogs of chase; next came a motley crew afoot; and women and children brought up the rear in waggons. They bore letters of safe-conduct from princes, one of which from the Emperor Sigismund they had probably procured that same year at Lindau on Lake Constance; and they gave out that they were on a seven years’ pilgrimage, imposed by their own bishops as a penance for apostasy from the Christian faith. They encamped in the fields by night outside the city walls, and were great thieves, especially the women, ‘wherefore several were taken and slain.’ In 1418 they are heard of at Leipzig, at Frankfort-on-Main, and in Switzerland at Zurich, Basel, Berne, and Soleure: the contemporary Swiss chronicler, Conrad Justinger, speaks of them as ‘more than two hundred baptized Heathens from Egypt, pitiful, black, miserable, and unbearable on account of their thefts, for they stole all they could.’ At Augsburg they passed for exiles from ‘Lesser Egypt’; at Macon in August 1419 they practised palmistry and necromancy; and at Sisteron in Provence as ‘Saracens’ they got large rations from the terrified townsfolk. In 1420 Lord Andreas, Duke of Little Egypt, and a hundred men, women, and children, came to Deventer in the Low Countries; and the aldermen had to pay 19 florins 10 placks for their bread, beer, herrings, and straw, as well as for cleaning out the barn in which they lay. At Tournay in 1421 ‘Sir Miquiel, Prince of Latinghem in Egypt,’ received twelve gold pieces, with bread and a barrel of beer.

At Bologna.

Next the Chronica di Bologna tells how ‘the 18th of July 1422 a duke of Egypt, Duke Andrew, arrived at Bologna, with women, children, and men from his own country. There might be a hundred. This duke having denied the Christian faith, the King of Hungary [the Emperor Sigismund] had taken possession of his lands and person. Then he told the King that he wished to return to Christianity, and he had been baptized with about four thousand men; those who refused baptism were put to death. After the King of Hungary had thus taken and rebaptized them, he commanded them to travel about the world for seven years, to go to Rome to see the pope, and then to return to their own country. When they arrived at Bologna, they had been journeying for five years, and more than half of them were dead. They had a mandate from the King of Hungary, the Emperor, permitting them during these seven years to thieve, wherever they might go, without being amenable to justice.

‘When they arrived at Bologna, they lodged themselves inside and outside the Gate of Galiera, and settled themselves under the porticoes, except the duke, who lodged at the King’s Inn (Albergo del Re). They remained a fortnight at Bologna. During this time many people went to see them, on account of the duke’s wife, who, it was said, could foretell what would happen to a person during his lifetime, as well as what was interesting in the present, how many children would be born, and other things. Concerning all which she told truly. And of those who wished to have their fortunes told, few went to consult without getting their purse stolen, and the women had pieces of their dress cut off. The women of the band wandered about the town, seven or eight together; they entered the houses of the inhabitants, and whilst they were telling idle tales, some of them laid hold of what was within their reach. In the same way they visited the shops under the pretext of buying something, but really to steal. Many thefts were thus committed at Bologna. So it was cried through the town that no one should go to see them under a penalty of fifty pounds and excommunication, for they were the most cunning thieves in all the world. It was even permitted those who had been robbed by them to rob them in return to the amount of their losses. In consequence of which several of the inhabitants of Bologna slipped during the night into a stable where some of their horses were shut up, and stole the best of them. The others, wishing to get back their horses, agreed to restore a great number of the stolen articles. But seeing that there was nothing more to gain there, they left Bologna and went off towards Rome.

‘Observe that they were the ugliest brood ever seen in this country. They were lean and black, and they ate like swine. Their women went in smocks, and wore a pilgrim’s cloak across the shoulder, rings in their ears, and a long veil on their head. One of them gave birth to a child in the market-place, and at the end of three days went on to rejoin her people.’

At Paris.

The Bourgeois of Paris, whose Journal records this visit with a Pepys-like fidelity, describes how multitudes ‘came from Paris, from Sainct Denis, and from the neighbourhood of Paris to see them. And it is true that the children, boys and girls, were as clever as could be. And most or nearly all had both ears pierced, and in each ear a silver ring, or two in each, and they said it was a sign of nobility in their own country. Item, the men were very black, their hair was frizzled; the women, the ugliest that could be seen, and the blackest. All had their faces covered with wounds (toutes avoient le visage deplaié), hair black as a horse’s tail, for sole dress an old blanket, very coarse, and fastened on the shoulder by a band of cloth or a cord, and underneath a shift, for all covering. In short, they were the poorest creatures ever seen in France in the memory of man. Yet, in spite of their poverty, there were witches among them who looked into people’s hands, and told what had happened to them, or would happen, and sowed discord in several marriages by saying to the husband, “Your wife has played you false,” or to the wife, “Your husband has played you false.” And what was worse, whilst they were speaking to folks, by magic or otherwise, or by the Enemy in Hell, or by dexterity and skill, it was said they emptied people’s purses and transferred the coin to their own. But in truth I went there three or four times to speak with them, yet never perceived that I lost a penny, nor did I ever see them look into a hand. But people said so everywhere, and it came to the ears of the Bishop of Paris, who went there, and took with him a Minorite friar called Little Jacobin. And he, by command of the bishop, made a fine preaching, excommunicating all who had believed them and shown them their hands. And they were obliged to depart, and departed on the day of Our Lady of September, and went away towards Pontoise.’

Three weeks later, at Amiens, Thomas, Earl of Little Egypt, with forty followers, received pious alms from the mayor and aldermen after exhibition of the papal letters; and during the next seven years we find similar scattered bands of Egyptians, Saracens from Egypt, or Heidens, at Tournai, Utrecht, Arnhem, Bommel, Middelburg, Metz, Leyden, Frankfort, etc. These, according to M. Bataillard, all belonged to the original band, some four hundred strong, which split up or reunited as occasion required, and which had probably started from the Balkan peninsula. The thirty tented Cingari or Cigäwnär, who encamped near Ratisbon in 1424 and 1426, seem on the other hand to have belonged to Hungary. Their leader had also a safe-conduct granted him at Zips on 23rd April 1423 by the Emperor Sigismund, and styling him ‘our faithful Ladislas, Woiwode of the Cigani’; and they gave out quite a different reason for their exile, that it was ‘in remembrance of the flight of our Lord into Egypt.’ The four hundred would-be pioneers, then, sent forward to spy out the lands of promise on behalf of vast hordes behind, who in 1438 began to pour over Germany, Italy, and France by thousands instead of by hundreds, and headed this time by King Zindl. Spain the Gypsies reached in 1447, Sweden by 1512, and Poland and Russia about 1501.

In England.

The earliest certain mention of their presence in England is this chance allusion in A Dyalog of Syr Thomas More, knyght (1529), bk. iii. ch. xv. In 1514 the king sent the lords to inquire into the death of Richard Hunne in the Lollards’ Tower, and a witness appeared who owned to having said ‘that he knew one who could tell who killed Hunne. “Well,” quoth the Lords, “at the last, yet with much work, we come to somewhat. But whereby think you that he can tell?” “Nay, forsooth, my Lord,” quoth he, “it is a woman. I would she were here with your Lordships now.” “Well,” quoth my Lord, “woman or man is all one. She shall be had wheresoever she be.” “By my faith, my Lord,” quoth he, “an’ she were with you, she could tell you wonders, by God. I have wist her tell many marvellous things ere now.” “Why,” quoth the Lords, “what have ye heard her tell?” “Forsooth, my Lords,” quoth he, “if a thing had been stolen, she would have told who had it. And therefore I think she could as well tell who killed Hunne as who stole a horse.” “Surely,” said the Lords, “so think we all, I trow. But how could she tell it—by the Devil?” “Nay, by my troth, I trow,” quoth he, “for I could never see her use any worse way than looking into one’s hand.” Therewith the Lords laughed, and asked, “What is she?” “Forsooth, my Lords,” quoth he, “an Egypcyan, and she was lodged here at Lambeth, but she is gone over sea now. Howbeit, I trow she be not in her own country yet, for they say it is a great way hence, and she went over little more than a month ago.” ’

It is quite Shakespearian, this scrap of dialogue; well, that is our earliest evidence for the presence of Gypsies in England. Eight years later, in 1522, the churchwardens of Stratton in Cornwall received twenty pence from the ‘Egypcions’ for the use of the church house; and some time between 1513 and 1524 Thomas, Earl of Surrey, entertained ‘Gypsions’ at his Suffolk seat, Tendring Hall. For all which, and eighty more similar notes of much interest, see Mr. H. T. Crofton’s ‘Early Annals of the Gypsies in England’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 5–24).

In Scotland.

In Scotland the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer yield this entry: ‘1505, April 22. Item to the Egyptianis be the Kingis command, vij lib.’; and Gypsies probably were the overliers and masterful beggars whom an Act of 1449 describes as going about the country with ‘horses, hunds, and other goods.’ In no other country were the Gypsies better received than in Scotland, where, on 3rd July 1505, James IV. gave Anthonius Gagino, Earl of Little Egypt, a letter of commendation to the King of Denmark; where in 1530 the ‘Egyptianis that dansit before the king in Halyrudhous’ received forty shillings, and where that same king, James V., subscribed a writ (February 15, 1540) in favour of ‘oure louit Johnne Faw, lord and erle of Litill Egipt,’ to whose son and successor, Johnne Wanne, he granted authority to hang and punish all Egyptians within the realme (May 26, 1540). Exactly when cannot be fixed, but about or soon after 1559, Sir William Sinclair, the Lord Justice-General, ‘delivered ane Egyptian from the gibbet in the Burrow Moore, ready to be strangled, returning from Edinburgh to Roslin, upon which accoumpt the whole body of gypsies were of old accustomed to gather in the stanks [marshes] of Roslin every year, where they acted severall plays, dureing the moneth of May and June. There are two towers,’ adds Father Richard Augustine Hay in his Genealogie of the Sainteclaires of Roslin (written 1700; ed. by Maidment, 1835, p. 136), ‘which were allowed them for their residence, the one called Robin Hood, the other Little John.’ Roslin seems to have been a Patmos of the race for upwards of fifty years, but in 1623–24 they were hunted out, and eight of their leaders hanged on the Burgh Muir. Six of those leaders were Faas; and eleven years before, on 21st August 1612, four other Egyptians of the same well-known surname had been put on trial as far north as Scalloway in Shetland. These were ‘Johne Fawe, elder, callit mekill Johne Faw, Johne Faw, younger, calit Littill Johne Faw, Katherin Faw, spous to umquhill Murdo Broun, and Agnes Faw, sister to the said Litill Johne.’ They were indicted for the murder of the said Murdo Brown, and for theft, sorcery, and fortune-telling, ‘and that they can help or hinder in the proffeit of the milk of bestiale.’ Three of them were acquitted; but Katherine, pleading guilty to having slain her husband with a ‘lang braid knyff,’ was sentenced to be ‘tane to the Bulwark and cassen over the same in the sey to be drownit to the death, and dome given thairupone.’ For all which, and a multitude more of most curious and recondite information, I refer my readers to Mr. David MacRitchie’s Scottish Gypsies under the Stewarts (Edinb. 1894, 120 pages), which has done for our northern tribes what Mr. Crofton had done for the southern. Its one omission is this, the earliest mention of Gypsies in the Highlands, contained in a news-letter from Dundee of January 1, 1651:—‘There are about an hundred people of severall nations, call’d heere by the name of Egyptians, which doe att this day ramble uppe and downe the North Highlands, the cheifest of which are one Hause and Browne: they are of the same nature with the English Gypsies, and doe after the same manner cheate and cosen the country’ (C. H. Firth’s Scotland and the Commonwealth, Edinb., Scottish Hist. Society, 1895, p. 29).

In North America.

As to America it was till recently supposed that there were not, had never been, any Gypsies there. In ‘The Fortune-teller,’ a story reprinted in Chambers’s Journal for November 25, 1843, from The Lady’s Book, an American publication, a Mrs. Somers is made to exclaim, ‘An English gipsy! Alice, you must be deceived. There never has been a gipsy in America.’ And, sure enough, the fortune-teller turns out to be no Gypsy. Nay, in a work so well-informed as Appleton’s American Cyclopædia (1874), the writer of the article ‘Gipsies’ pronounces it ‘questionable whether a band of genuine Gipsies has ever been in America.’ Yet in 1665 at Edinburgh the Privy Council gave warrant and power to George Hutcheson, merchant, and his co-partners to transport to Jamaica and Barbadoes Egyptians and other loose and dissolute persons; and on 1st January 1715 nine Border Gypsies, men and women, of the names of Faa, Stirling, Yorstoun, Finnick (Fenwick), Lindsey, Ross, and Robertson, were transported by the magistrates of Glasgow to the Virginia plantations at a cost of thirteen pounds sterling (Gypsy Lore Journal, ii. 60–62). That is all, or practically all, we know of the coming of the Gypsies to North America, where, at New York, there were house-dwelling Gypsies as far back as 1850, and where to-day there must be hundreds or thousands of the race from England, Scotland, Hungary, Spain, one knows not whence else besides. Some day somebody will study them and write about them; meanwhile we have merely stray jottings by Simson and Leland.

In South America.

For South America our information was, quite recently, even more meagre. Twenty years ago I just knew from Henry Koster’s Travels in Brazil (Lond. 1816, p. 399) of the presence of Ciganos there, whom he described as ‘a people of a brownish cast, with features which resemble those of white persons, and tall and handsome. They wander from place to place in parties of men, women, and children, exchanging, buying, and selling horses, and gold and silver trinkets.… They are said to be unmindful of all religious observances, and never to hear Mass or confess their sins. It is likewise said that they never marry out of their own nation.’ Since then, however, Mello Moraes has published Os Ciganos no Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1886), which, besides a Rómani glossary, gives a good historical and statistical account of the Brazilian Gypsies. They seem to be the descendants of Ciganos transported from Portugal towards the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Thus, by a decree of 27th August 1685, the Gypsies were henceforth to be transported to Maranhão, instead of to Africa; and in 1718, by a decree of 11th April, the Gypsies were banished from the kingdom to the city of Bahia, special orders being given to the governor to be diligent in the prohibition of the language and ‘cant’ (giria), not permitting them to teach it to their children, that so it might die out. It was about this time, according to ‘Sr. Pinto Noites, an estimable and venerable Gypsy of eighty-nine years,’ that his ancestors and kinsfolk arrived at Rio de Janeiro—nine families transported hither by reason of a robbery imputed to the Gypsies. The heads of these nine families were João da Costa Ramos, called João do Reino, with his son, Fernando da Costa Ramos, and his wife, Dona Eugenia; Luis Rabello de Aragão; one Ricardo Frago, who went to Minas; Antonio Laço, with his wife, Jacintha Laço; the Count of Cantanhede; Manoel Cabral and Antonio Curto, who settled in Bahia, accompanied by daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, as well as by wife and sons. They applied themselves to metallurgy—were tinkers, farriers, braziers, and goldsmiths; the women told fortunes and gave charms to avert the evil eye. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Brazilian Gypsies seem to have been great slave-dealers, just as their brethren on this side of the Atlantic have always been great dealers in horses and asses. We read on p. 40 of ‘M …, afterwards Marquis of B …, belonging to the Bohemian race, whose immense fortune proceeded from his acting as middleman in the purchase of slaves for Minas.’ And there are several more indications, scattered through the book, that the Brazilian nation, from highest to lowest, must be strongly tinctured with Rómani blood. We know far too little about the Chinganéros or Montanéros, wandering minstrels of Venezuela, to identify them more or less vaguely with Gypsies (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 306, 373); and a like remark applies, even more strongly, to the Lowbeys of Gambia, who have been described as the ‘Gypsies of North-West Africa,’ who never intermarry with another race, and who confine themselves almost exclusively to the making of the various wooden utensils in use by natives generally (ib. i. 54). Still, these Lowbeys may be the descendants of Gypsies transported from Portugal, or of the Basque Gypsies, whole bands of whom so lately as 1802 were caught by night as in a net, huddled on shipboard, and landed on the coast of Africa (Michel’s Pays Basque, p. 137).

In Australia.

To transportation Australia certainly owed its earliest Gypsies. In 1880, a few months before his death, Tom Taylor wrote to me:—‘The only Gypsy I ever knew who had travelled among “the people” was one Jones, who used to drive a knife-grinding wheel at Cambridge. Having “left his country for his country’s good” in the old transportation days, he had made his escape from Australia, and, the ship aboard which he had stowed himself putting into a Spanish port, had landed, met with some of the Zincali, and travelled with them for some time. He was looked on as a master of “deep Rommany” among the Gypsies round Cambridge.’ Mr. MacRitchie has a letter containing a longish list of wealthy Australian Gypsies, whose grandsires were bitchadé párdel (‘sent over’); yet, according to the Orange Guardian of May 1866:—‘The first Gypsies seen in Australia passed through Orange the other day en route for Mudgee. Although they can scarcely be reckoned new arrivals, as they have been nearly two years in the colony, they bear about them all the marks of the Gypsy. The women stick to the old dress, and are still as anxious as ever to tell fortunes; but they say that this game does not pay in Australia, as the people are not so credulous here as they are at home. Old “Brown Joe” is a native of Northumberland, and has made a good deal of money even during his short sojourn here. They do not offer themselves generally as fortune-tellers, but, if required and paid, they will at once “read your palm.” At present they obtain a livelihood by tinkering and making sealing-wax. Their time during the last week has been principally taken up in hunting out bees’ nests, which are very profitable, as they not only sell the honey, but, after purifying and refining the wax, manufacture it into beautiful toys, so rich in colour and transparency that it would be almost impossible to guess the material’ (quoted in Notes and Queries, 28th July 1866, p. 65).

Transportation.

Banishment and transportation have been important factors in the dispersion of the Gypsies. They were banished from Germany in 1497, Spain in 1499, France in 1504, England in 1531, Denmark in 1536, Moravia in 1538, Scotland in 1541, Poland in 1557, Venetia in 1549, 1558, and 1588, etc.; to such banishment is probably due the fact that in 1564 we find in the Netherlands a Gypsy woman, Katarine Mosroesse, who had been born in Scotland. Besides the transportation, already noticed, of Scottish Gypsies to Jamaica, Barbadoes, and Virginia, of Portuguese Gypsies to Africa and Brazil, of Basque Gypsies to Africa, and of English Gypsies to Botany Bay, we know that some time prior to 1800 Gitanos were transported from Spain to Louisiana; whilst in 1544 we find one large band of Egyptians being sentenced at Huntingdon to be taken to Calais, the nearest English port on the Continent, and another being shipped at Boston in Lincolnshire and landed somewhere in Norway.

In Crete.

In Corfu.

The Empress Catherine de Courtenay-Valois (1301–46), granted to the suzerains of Corfu authority to receive as vassals certain ‘homines vageniti,’ coming from the Greek mainland, and using the Greek rite. By the close of the fourteenth century these vageniti were all of them subject to a single baron, Gianuli de Abitabulo, and formed the nucleus of a fief called the fief of Abitabulo or feudum Acinganorum, which lasted under various superiors until the abolition of feudal tenures in the beginning of the present century. One of those superiors, about 1540, was the learned Antonio Eparco, Melanchthon’s correspondent; another, the tyrannical Count Teodoro Michele, who died in 1787. This little Gypsy colony, numbering about a hundred adults, besides children, had a tax to pay twice a year to their superior, as also such fines as two gold pieces and a couple of fat hens for permission to marry. They were mechanics, smiths, tinkers, and husbandmen; celebrated a great yearly festival on the first of May; and were amenable only to the jurisdiction of their lord. Carl Hopf, in Die Einwanderung der Zigeuner in Europa (Gotha, 1870, pp. 17–23), tells us much about them, collected from the papers of Count Teodoro Trivoli, who succeeded to the property in 1863. Still we would fain know much more, especially something as to their language. One point to be noticed is that Italians must in Corfu have come early in contact with Gypsies, for the island belonged to Venice from 1401 to 1797.

In the Peloponnesus.

In Roumania.

In 1387 Mircea I., woiwode of Wallachia, by a charter still preserved in the archives of Bucharest, renewed a grant made about 1370 by his uncle Vladislav to the monastery of St Anthony at Voditza of forty salaschi (‘tents’ or families) of Atsegane. Which shows that already the Roumanian Gypsies were serfs; and serfs they continued till 1856. To the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (vol. i., Lond., 1857, pp. 37–41) Mr. Samuel Gardner, H.M. Consul at Jassy, contributed some interesting ‘Notes on the Condition of the Gypsy Population of Moldavia.’ ‘The Tzigans,’ he says, ‘are an intelligent and industrious race, and in their general condition of prædial slavery (for few are in reality emancipated) are a reproach to the country and to the Government. Many of them are taught arts. They are the blacksmiths, locksmiths, bricklayers, masons, farriers, musicians, and cooks especially, of the whole country.… They dwell in winter in subterranean excavations, the roof alone appearing above ground, and in summer in brown serge tents of their own fabric.… The children, to the age of ten or twelve, are in a complete state of nudity; but the men and women, the latter offering frequently the most symmetrical form and feminine beauty, have a rude clothing. Their implements and carriages, of a peculiar construction, display much ingenuity. They are in fact very able artisans and labourers, industrious and active, but are cruelly and barbarously treated. In the houses of their masters they are employed in the lowest offices, live in the cellars, have the lash continually applied to them, and are still subjected to the iron collar and a kind of spiked iron mask or helmet, which they are obliged to wear as a mark of punishment and degradation for every petty offence.’ The Gypsies of Wallachia and Moldavia are referred to in eleven original documents of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Every one of these documents speaks of them as serfs, but we get never a hint of when they were first reduced to serfdom.

The Chaltsmide.

Athingani.

From whatever cause, it seems certain that a confusion did exist between the Ἀτσίγκανοι, or Gypsies, and the Ἀθίγγανοι, or heretics forming a branch of the Manichæan sect of the Paulicians, which renders it sometimes extremely difficult to determine whom the Byzantine historians are speaking of in seven passages collected by Dr. Franz von Miklosich in his great work, Ueber die Mundarten und die Wanderungen der Zigeuner Europa’s (part vi., 1876, Vienna, pp. 57–64). It appears from these that the Athingani, described as magicians, soothsayers, and serpent-charmers, first emerge in Byzantine history under Nicephorus I. (802–11), were banished by Michael I. (811–13), and were restored to favour by Michael II. (820–29). But Miklosich’s grounds for absolutely identifying them with Gypsies, and positively asserting the latter to have appeared at Byzantium in 810 under Nicephorus, are hard to recognise.

Atsincan.

Komodromoi.

What it was first directed my attention to the Komodromoi of Byzantine writers I cannot be positive, but I am pretty sure it was something somewhere in Pott. Not in any of the 1034 pages of his Zigeuner in Europa und Asien (2 vols., Halle, 1844–45), for I have once more gone through that stupendous work, but perhaps in a letter, perhaps in a conversation, or perhaps in one of his contributions to the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. Anyhow, I am sure no work hitherto on the Gypsies has cited this extract from Du Cange’s Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediæ et Infimæ Græcitatis (Paris, 1688):—

‘κωμοδρόμοι, interdum κομοδρόμοι, Circulatores, atque adeò Fabri ærarij qui per pagos cursitant: ut hodie passim apud nos, quos Chaudroniers dicimus. Lexicon MS. ad Schedographiam:

Βαβαὶ, θαυμαστικόν ἐστι, Βάναυσος, ὁ χαλκεύς τε,

Καὶ χρυσοχόος, λέγεται, ἀλλὰ καὶ κωμοδρόμος.

Glossæ Græcobarb. Ἀκμὼν, σίδηρον ἐφ’ ᾧ χαλκεὺς χαλκεύει, ἤγουν ἀκμόνιν ὁπου κομοδρομεύει ὁ κομοδρόμος. Alibi, Ἀκροφύσια, τὰ ἄκρα τῶν ἀσκῶν, ἐν οἷς οἰ χαλκεῖς τὸ πῦρ ἐκφυσῶσιν· αἱ ἄκραι, ἤγουν ἡ ἄκρες τῶν ἀσκῶν ἤ ἀσκιῶν, μεθ’ αἷς ὁποίαις φυσοῦσιν οἱ κομοδρόμοι τὴν φωτίαν. Theophanes, an. 17 Justiniani: τὶς ἐκ τῶν Ἰταλῶν χῶρας κομοδρόμος,—ἔχων μεθ’ ἑαυτο͂υ κύνα ξανθὸν καὶ τυφλὸν, etc. Constantinus de Adm. Imp. c. 50, p. 182, καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ θέματος τῶν Ἀρμενιακῶν εἰς τὸ τοῦ Χαρσιανοῦ θέμα μετέθησαν ταῦτα τὰ βάνδα, ἤτοι ἡ τοῦ κομοδρόμου τοποτηρεσία Ταβίας, καὶ εἰς τὴν τούρμαν τοῦ Χαρσιανοῦ τὴν εἰρημένην προσετέθησαν. Anonymus de Passione Domini: καὶ ὅτε φθάσωσιν εἰς τὸν τόπον, ἐλθὼν ὁ κομοδρόμος ἀς σταυρώσει αὐτὸν, etc. Occurrit præterea in Annalib. Glycæ.’

Dictionaries are not as a rule lively reading; but every line almost in this extract has its interest. Komodromos, ‘village-roamer,’ is certainly a vague term, but no vaguer than landlooper, which does in Dutch stand for ‘Gypsy,’ as landlouper does for ‘vagrant’ in Lowland Scotch. Du Cange’s own definition of komodromoi as roamers (circulatores) and coppersmiths who rove about the country, like those in our midst whom we call Chaudronniers, must have been meant by him to apply to Gypsies, and to Gypsies only. The modern Roumanian and Hungarian Gypsies are divided into certain classes—Caldarari (chaudronniers or caldron-smiths), Aurari (gold-workers), etc.; and Bataillard’s note prefixed to most of his monographs runs—‘L’auteur recevrait avec reconnaissance toute communication relative aux Bohémiens hongrois voyageant hors de leur pays (vrais nomades pourvus de tentes et de chariots, la plupart chaudronniers).’ Next, the six passages quoted by Du Cange show that the komodromos was variously or conjointly a coppersmith (chalkeus) and a gold-worker (chrysochoos, defined by Du Cange as ‘aurifer, aurarius’). The Gypsy Aurari have practised gold-washing in Wallachia and Transylvania from time immemorial (Grellmann, Die Zigeuner, 2nd ed. 1787, pp. 105–112); but we have also many indications of the Gypsies as actual goldsmiths. Captain Newbold says that the Persian Gypsies ‘sometimes practise the art of the gold and silver smith, and are known to be forgers of the current coin of Persia. These are the zergars (lit. “workers in gold”) of the tribe’ (Jour. Roy. Asiatic Soc., vol. xvi. 1856, p. 310). The Egyptian Gypsies, he tells us, at Cairo ‘carry on the business of tinkers and blacksmiths, and vend ear-rings, amulets, bracelets, and instruments of iron and brass’ (ib. p. 292). The Gypsy bronze and brass founders of Western Galicia and the Bukowina—the only Gypsy metallurgists of whom, thanks to Kopernicki, we possess really full information—are called Zlotars and Dzvonkars, Ruthenian words meaning ‘goldsmiths’ and ‘bell-makers.’ They are no longer workers in gold, but they do make rings, crosses, clasps, ear-rings, etc., of brass and German silver (Bataillard, Les Zlotars, 1878, 70 pages). Henri van Elven, in ‘The Gypsies in Belgium’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, ii. 139), says: ‘The women wear bracelets and large earrings of gold, copper, or bronze, seldom of silver; while all the Gypsies wear earrings [cf. supra, p. xii.]. It appears to me that the Gypsy jewels and the metal-work of their pipes have not yet been sufficiently studied. In the fabrication of these objects they must have preserved something typical and antique, which would contribute to the comparative study of their ancient industries. I remember seeing some rings, cast in bronze, of which the setting was ornamented with a double or a single cross, and whose ornamentation recalled the motifs of the Middle Ages, the style being evidently Oriental. Their walking-sticks are topped with copper or bronze hatchets, but more frequently with round knobs, which are hollow, and which hold their money, the lid being screwed off and on. These Gypsies were tin-workers, repairing metal utensils, and also basket-makers.’ The Gypsies, says Dr. R. W. Felkin, ‘appear to be on friendly terms with the natives of the country, and curiously enough they are said to have introduced the art of filigree work and gold-beating into Darfûr’ (‘Central African Gypsies,’ Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 221). Even the Brazilian Gypsies of 1816, as we have seen from Koster’s Travels, sold gold and silver trinkets.

The reference to the anvil and to the bellows of skins with which the komodromoi blew up their furnace recalls the passage cited from Arnold von Harff on p. xx., where, about 1497, he described the anvil and the bellows of the Modone Gypsies. Gypsy bellows are figured in Bataillard’s Les Zlotars, in Van Elven’s article, and in Die Metalle bei den Naturvölkern of Richard Andree (Leip. 1884, p. 83). Arthur J. Patterson in The Magyars: their Country and Institutions (1869, ii. 198) writes: ‘A curious consequence of their practising the art of the smith is that a Gypsy boy is in Hungary called purde, which is generally supposed to be the equivalent in the Gypsy language for “boy.” It is really the imperative mood of the verb “to blow,” for, while the Gypsy father is handling the hammer and the tongs, he makes his son manage the bellows.’ Small points enough these, but they must be viewed in relation to the metallurgical monopoly still largely enjoyed by the Gypsies in south-east Europe and in Asia Minor. So exclusively was the smith’s a Gypsy (and therefore a degrading) craft in Montenegro that, when in 1872 the Government established an arsenal at Rieka, no natives could be found to fill its well-paid posts. And in a very long letter of 21st January 1880, the late Mr. Hyde Clarke wrote to me that ‘over more than one sanják of the Aidin viceroyalty the Gypsies have still a like monopoly of iron-working; the naalband, or shoeing-smith, being no smith in our sense at all. He is supplied with shoes of various sizes by the Gypsies, and only hammers them on.’ It is most unlikely that, if recent comers to the Levant, the Gypsies should have acquired such a monopoly; it is obvious that, if they possessed that monopoly a thousand years ago, these komodromoi must have been Gypsies.

For Du Cange’s first three quotations I can assign no dates, but Theophanes Isaurus was born in 758 and died in 818; the seventeenth year of Justinian would be 544 A.D.—a very early date at which to find a Gypsy from Italy, ‘having with him a blind yellow dog.’ The dates of the Emperor Constantinus Porphyrogenitus are 905–959; I own I can make little of this passage from his Liber de administrando Imperio, but thema, bandon, topoteresia, and tourma seem all to be words for administrative divisions.

Nails of Crucifixion.

Du Cange’s last passage is by far the most interesting:—‘Anonymus de Passione Domini: “And when they arrive at the place, the komodromos coming to crucify him,” etc.’ ‘Why so interesting? there does not seem much in that,’ my readers may exclaim. Why? because there is a widely-spread superstition that a Gypsy forged the nails for the crucifixion, and that henceforth his race has been accursed of heaven. That superstition was first recorded in an article by Dr. B. Bogisic on ‘Die slavisirten Zigeuner in Montenegro’ (Das Ausland, 25th May 1874); and in Le Folklore de Lesbos, by G. Georgeakis and Léon Pineau (Paris, 1891, pp. 273–8), is this ‘Chant du Vendredi Saint,’ this plaint of Our Lady:—

‘Our Lady was in a grotto

And made her prayer.

She hears rolling of thunder,

She sees lightnings,

She hears a great noise.

She goes to the window:

She sees the heaven all black

And the stars veiled:

The bright moon was bathed in blood.

She looks to right, she looks to left:

She perceives St. John;

She sees John coming

In tears and dejection:

He holds a handkerchief spotted with blood.

“Good-day, John. Wherefore

These tears and this dejection?

Has thy Master beaten thee,

Or hast thou lost the Psalter?”

“The Master has not beaten me,

And I have not lost the Psalter.

I have no mouth to tell it thee,

Nor tongue to speak to thee:

And thine heart will be unable to hear me.

These miserable Jews have arrested my Master,

They have arrested him like a thief,

And they are leading him away like a murderer.”

Our Lady, when she heard it,

Fell and swooned.

They sprinkle her from a pitcher of water,

From three bottles of musk,

And from four bottles of rose-water,

Until she comes to herself.

When she was come to herself, she says,

“All you who love Christ and adore him,

Come with me to find him,

Before they kill him,

And before they nail him,

And before they put him to death.

Let Martha, Magdalene, and Mary come,

And the mother of the Forerunner.”

These words were still on her lips,

Lo! five thousand marching in front,

And four thousand following after.

They take the road, the path of the Jews.

No one went near the Jews except the unhappy mother.

The path led them in front of the door of a nail-maker.

She finds the nail-maker with his children,

The nail-maker with his wife.

“Good-day, workman, what art making there?”

“The Jews have ordered nails of me;

They have ordered four of me;

But I, I am making them five.”

“Tell me, tell me, workman,

What they will do with them.”

“They will put two nails in his feet,

Two others in his hands;

And the other, the sharpest,

Will pierce his lung.”

Our Lady, when she heard it,

Fell and swooned.

They sprinkle her from a pitcher of water

From three bottles of musk,

And from four bottles of rose;

Until she comes to herself.

When she had come to herself she says:

“Be accursed, O Tziganes!

May there never be a cinder in your forges,

May there never be bread on your bread-pans,

Nor buttons to your shirts!”

They take the road,’ etc.

And M. Georgeakis adds in a footnote, ‘The Tziganes whom one sees in the island of Mitylene are all smiths.’ It is a far cry from the Greek Archipelago to the Highlands of Scotland, but in the Gypsy Lore Journal (iii. 1892, p. 190), is this brief unsigned note: ‘I should be pleased to know if you have the tradition in the South [of Scotland], that the tinkers are descendants of the one who made the nails for the Cross, and are condemned to wander continually without rest.’ No answer appeared; and I know of no other hint of the currency of this belief in Western Europe, unless it be the couplet:—

‘A whistling maid and a crowing hen

Are hateful alike to God and men,’

This Gypsy counter-legend offers a possible explanation of the hitherto-unexplained transition from four nails to three in crucifixes during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The change must at first have been hardly less startling than a crucifix now would be in which both hands should be pierced with one nail. Dr. R. Morris discusses it in his Introduction to Legends of the Holy Rood (Early Eng. Text Soc., 1871). There it appears that while St. Gregory Nazianzen, Nonnus, and the author of the Ancren Riwle speak of three nails only, SS. Cyprian, Augustine, and Gregory of Tours, Pope Innocent III., Rufinus, Theodoret, and Ælfric speak of four; and that the earliest known crucifix with three nails only is a copper one, of probably Byzantine workmanship, dating from the end of the twelfth century. Now, if the Byzantine Gypsies possessed at that date a metallurgical monopoly, this crucifix must of course have been fashioned by Gypsy hands, when the three nails would be an easily intelligible protest against the calumny that those nails were forged by the founder of the Gypsy race.

Gypsy Language.

Slavonic loan-words come next to the Greek: English Rómani has some thirty of the former, against fifty of the latter. There are also a few words of Persian, Armenian, Roumanian, Magyar, and German origin; but the question of the presence or the absence of Arabic words in European Rómani is hardly yet determined. According to Professor De Goeje (1875; trans. in MacRitchie’s Gypsies of India, 1886, pp. 54–5), there are at least ten such words; according to Miklosich (Ueber die Mundarten, etc., part vi. 1876, pp. 63–64), there are none. Kótor, a piece, for instance, by De Goeje is derived from the Arabic kot’a, by Miklosich from the Armenian kotor. Neither, however, of the two scholars seems to have recognised the possible importance of the presence or the absence (especially the absence) of Arabic elements. Rómani contains Persian words, e.g. ambról, a pear; would it not have certainly contained also Arabic words if the ancestors of our modern European Gypsies had sojourned in Persia, or even passed through Persia, at a date later than the Arab conquest of Persia? If Miklosich is right in his contention that there are no Arabic words in European Rómani, it follows almost inevitably that the Gypsies must have passed through Persia on their way to Europe at some date prior to the middle of the seventh century A.D.

Important as are the borrowings of Rómani for helping us to trace the Gypsies’ wanderings, they can barely amount to a twentieth of the total vocabulary (five thousand words rich, perhaps). The words of that vocabulary for ‘water’ and ‘knife’ are in Persia páni, cheri (1823); in Siberia, panji, tschuri (1878); in Armenia, pani, churi (1864); in Egypt, páni, chúri (1856); in Norway, pani, tjuri (1858); in England pani, churi (1830); in, probably, Belgium, panin, chouri (1597); in Brazil, panin, churin (1886)—where spelling and dates are those of the works whence these words have been taken. Over and above the identity in every Rómani dialect of these two selected words—and there are hundreds more like them—they are also identical with the Hindustani pani and churi, familiar to all Anglo-Indians. And to cite but a few more instances, ‘nose,’ ‘hair,’ ‘eye,’ ‘ear’ are in Turkish Rómani nak, bal, akh, kann; in Hindustani, nak, bal, akh, kan: whilst ‘Go, see who knocks at the door’ in the one language is Jâ, dik kon chalavéla o vudár, and in the other Jâ, dekh kon chaláya dvár ko. This discovery was not made till long after specimens of Rómani had been published—by Andrew Boorde (1542), whose twenty-six words, jotted down seemingly in a Sussex alehouse, were intended to illustrate the ‘speche of Egipt’; by Bonaventura Vulcanius (1597), whose vocabulary of seventy-one words, collected apparently in Belgium, fills up some blank pages in a Latin work on the Goths; and by Ludolphus (1691), whose thirty-eight words are embedded in his huge Commentarius ad Historiam Æthiopicam. In 1777 Rüdiger first compared with Hindustani some specimens of Rómani got from a Gypsy woman at Halle, and in 1782 he published the result of the comparison in his Neuester Zuwachs der Sprachkunde. In 1783 Grellmann’s Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner reaped all the fruits of Rüdiger’s research; and William Marsden the same year was independently led to a like discovery (Archæologia, 1785, pp. 382–6). Grellmann, whose work has still a high value, leapt naturally enough to the conclusion that the Gypsies who showed themselves in western Europe in 1417 had newly come also to south-eastern Europe, and were a low-caste Indian tribe expelled from their native country about 1409 by Tamerlane. In 1783 the older languages of India were a sealed book to Europeans; and Grellmann’s opinion found almost universal approval for upwards of sixty years. Now, however, thanks to the linguistic labours of Pott, Ascoli, and Miklosich, combined with the historical researches of Bataillard and Hopf, the question has assumed a new aspect. For while on the one hand it has been demonstrated that south-east Europe had its Gypsies long before 1417, so on the other Rómani has been shown to be a sister, not a daughter—and it may be an elder sister—of the seven principal New Indian dialects. Not a few of its forms are more primitive than theirs, or even than those of Pali and the Prakrits—e.g. the Turkish Rómani vast, hand (Sansk. hasta, Pali hattha), and vusht, lip (Sansk. ostha, Pali ottha). In his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Zigeunermundarten (iv. 1878, pages 45–54) Miklosich collected a number of such forms; but Miklosich it was who also pointed out there that many of the seeming archaisms of Rómani may be matched from the less-known dialects of India, especially north-west India—that we find, for example, in Dardu both hast and usht. I have not the faintest notion what was Professor Sayce’s authority for his statement that ‘the grammar and dictionary of the Romany prove that they started from their kindred, the Jats, on the north-western coast of India, near the mouth of the Indus, not earlier than the tenth century of the Christian era’ (The Science of Language, ii. 325). So far as I know, the only attempted comparison between Rómani and Játáki was made by myself (‘Gipsies,’ Enc. Brit., x. 618); and its results seemed wholly unfavourable to the Jat theory of the Gypsies’ origin.

Gypsies as Nomads.

Caldarari.

Mutatis mutandis, the same seems to hold good of the Gypsies of Germany, Poland, Norway, etc.; they are apparently the descendants of early immigrants into those different countries. But the case is quite otherwise with the Caldarari, or coppersmiths, of Hungary, for they will wander forth north, south, east, west, and sometimes stay away a whole seven years. Myself I have met with Caldarari but once, at Halle, in 1875; I described that brief meeting thus in my Gypsy Tents (1880, pp. 43–44):—

‘I had been paying my first call to Professor Pott, who had told me that only once had he spoken with living Gypsies, somewhere near London. So I asked him did they never come to Halle, and he answered, No; and presently I came away. I was not two hundred yards from his doorstep, when I saw a curious sort of skeleton waggon, drawn by two little horses, with their forelegs shackled together. On the top of this waggon sat a woman smoking a big black pipe; and round it three or four children were playing, stark-naked. The waggon was standing outside an inn; and entering the inn, I found two Gypsy men seated at the table, eating soup and drinking beer. I greeted them with “Látcho dívvus” (Good-day), and they seemed not the least bit surprised, for these were travelled gentlemen. Three years they had been away from Hungary, in France and Germany; and they could both speak French and German fluently. We talked of many things, and compared, I remember, passports: mine they pronounced an exceeding shúkar lil (fine document), the lion and unicorn seeming to take their fancy. Every place they came to, they had to go first thing to the head policeman and show their passes, and then he told them where they were to stop. They were allowed three days in every place, and no one could meddle with them all that time.… The women came in, two of them, and some of the children. There was one, a little fellow of nine or ten, as brown and pretty a thing as ever I saw, but wild as a fox-cub. His father gave him a plate of soup to finish, and he lapped it up just as a fox-cub would, looking out at me now and again from behind his mother. Then they paid their reckoning, the women climbed up on the waggon, the children shouted, and the men cracked their whips. “God go with thee, brother”; and so we parted.’

There is not much in that, but one cannot learn much in half an hour’s chance interview. Nor, indeed, is there very much in all the scattered notes that I have been able thus far to collect respecting the Caldarari; some of those notes relate to them only conjecturally. Du Cange’s definition of komodromoi proves that coppersmiths roamed through France in 1688; and it is at least highly probable that to this caste belonged the band of forty Gypsies with whom, in the spring of 1604, Jacques Callot, a boy of twelve, wandered from Nancy to Florence. Of the journey itself we know nothing, but he has left an imperishable record of it in his three matchless engravings of the ‘Bohémiens,’ which show them on the march, in their bivouac, and spoiling the Gentiles. Charles Reade worked a clever description of Callot’s engravings into his Cloister and the Hearth, and they were admirably reproduced in the Gypsy Lore Journal for January 1890, with a long article on them by Mr. David MacRitchie.

In his Travels (1763, ii. 157–8), under the date 1721, John Bell of Antermony has the following passage:—‘During our stay at Tobolsky, I was informed, that a large troop of gipsies had been lately at that place, to the number of sixty and upwards, consisting of men, women, and children. The Russians call these vagabonds tziggany. Their sorry baggage was carried on horses and asses. The arrival of so many strangers being reported to Mr. Petroff Solovoy, the vice-governor, he sent for some of the chief of the gang, and demanded whither they were going? they answered him, to China; upon which he told them he could not permit them to proceed any farther eastward, as they had no passport; and ordered them to return to the place whence they came. It seems these people had roamed, in small parties, during the summer season, cross the vast countries between Poland and this place; subsisting themselves on what they could find, and on selling trinkets, and telling fortunes to the country people. But Tobolsky, being the place of rendezvous, was the end of their long journey eastwards; and they, with no small regret, were obliged to turn their faces to the west again.’ I fancy these Gypsies also must have been Caldarari. But whether they were or no, the passage remains one of the most curious that we have relating to Gypsy migrations. Taken in its most limited sense, it shows that the band had wandered in small detachments from Poland to Tobolsk, a distance of two thousand miles or upwards. But it suggests a great deal more than this. There seems no reason to question the statement that China was really the ultimate goal of their wanderings. If so, it is probable that they were following in the track of former migrations, that Gypsies had been in the habit of passing backwards and forwards between Europe and China, which opens up a vista of a possible connection between the West and the farthest East undreamed of by all our geographers. But without further evidence this must be mere conjecture. Of Gypsies in China I know nothing whatever, except that a Russian noble, Prince Galitzin, whom I met three years since in Edinburgh, assured me he had seen a number of them there. Physique, outward appearance, seemed his only test; and his statement, though interesting, needs corroboration.

The Weserzeitung of 25th April 1851 announced that one hundred Gypsies had passed through Frankfort, on their way from Hungary to Algeria; and in the Revue de l’Orient for 20th January 1889 Madame Marlet thus described her meeting with a Hungarian Gypsy in North Africa:—‘I shall ever remember a scene which I witnessed in Africa. It was one evening at the base of the superb mountains of Mustapha Supérieur, just as the setting sun flooded the plain with his last rays of golden and crimson light—the gold and purple of the incomparable majesty of the Eastern sky. I observed a caravan of nomads encamped in the plain beneath their tents. I drew near, and saw that they were Gypsies, but Gypsies who had dwelt under other skies. Some were Spanish Gitanos, with garments of many hues, their shears hanging by their sides, at the end of a silvered chain wound around their blades; the others came from Morocco, and wore the simple white attire of the Children of the Desert. They received me with indifference. By means of my knowledge of Italian I managed at length to make the Gitanos understand that I came from Hungary. They were at once alive with interest. “Hungaria!” I heard them whisper into one another’s ears; and finally an old Gypsy man informed me, “There is one of us who comes straight from that very country.” They ran all at once to seek him out. But the young Gypsy—a superb, swarthy figure—quite unmoved, maintained a proud and gloomy silence. Did he suspect me of untruth in telling him that I knew that Hungary, so far away beyond the wide stretch of sea? He may have thought so. However, I saw that the old Gitano had told the truth. The dress of the young nomad was entirely Hungarian, from his shining boots up to his little Magyar calpate. His attire generally was rather rich than poor. Had I conversed with him in Hungarian, perhaps his heart would have softened. But he remained thus, sombre and mistrustful, and only the Gitanos, who, in their fantastic rags, stood around us, repeated vivaciously in Spanish, as they pointed towards him, “Patria Hungaria!” ’

Ciboure.

Alas! the Gypsy Lore Society is dead; after four years’ most excellent work it died of want of support in 1892. And that question remains still unanswered. In the passage itself, however, there is a good deal to be noticed. Ciboure at present has little or nothing to draw foreign Gypsies to it; but a hundred, two hundred years ago, it was probably a genuine Gypsy quarter: then there would be every reason why Caldarari should make it a regular halting-place. This conjecture, if valid, suggests the antiquity of these strange peregrinations; and Gypsies assuredly are the very staunchest conservatives. Another guess is that at Ascain Gypsies very likely are buried; that would fully account for their descendants turning aside thus. Mr. Webster’s remark as to the ease with which Basque scholars acquire Magyar, and Hungarians Basque, was well worth making; still the fact remains—and it is an important one for our theory—that the unlettered Gypsies as a race are marvellous linguists. The immigrants of 1417–34 must, to tell fortunes as they did, have been able to speak German, French, and Italian; and I could, if necessary, adduce many testimonies as to the Gypsies’ faculty for picking up foreign languages. I have myself known an English Gypsy family remove (for family reasons) into Wales, and in three years’ time become thoroughly Cymricised.

In an article on the Lithuanian Gypsies (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 252) M. Mieczyslaw Dowojno-Sylwestrowicz says: ‘Sometimes we are visited also by Hungarian, Servian, and Roumanian Gypsies. These last consider themselves to belong to the Orthodox (i.e. the Russian) Church. They are mostly tinkers, repairing copper cooking utensils; but of these they are very apt to steal the copper bottoms, substituting an imitation of papier-mâché. They differ greatly from our own Gypsies, whom they excel in an incredible amount of obtrusiveness; moreover, they attack and rob wayfarers, and when asked what they are, they say, “We are not Gypsies, sir, we are Magyars.” ’

In 1879 Sir Henry Howorth encountered in Sweden fez-wearing Gypsies, natives presumably of the Balkan peninsula; and in July 1881 a band of Gypsy blacksmiths from Corfu landed in Corsica, after having travelled over Italy (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 204, note). Late in the sixties a company of Caldarari visited England, and encamped at several points round London. I know no mention of this visit in print, and I never met them myself, but I have talked with English Gypsies who did, and who were full of their little horses, their big copper vessels, and curious Rómani. Some of the Taylors on Rushmere Heath in 1873 told me these foreign Gypsies ‘came from the Langári country, and were called Langarians.’

‘Greek Gypsies.’

In July 1886 ninety-nine Gypsies arrived by train at Liverpool. They were called the ‘Greek Gypsies,’ and had started from Corfu, but according to their passports came from all parts of Greece and European Turkey, as also from Servia, Bulgaria, Roumania, even Smyrna. Three hundred napoleons their journey had cost them thus far, and they meant to take shipping to New York. But America being closed to ‘pauper’ immigrants, no steamboat company would accept them, and they had perforce to encamp at Liverpool. Their encampment was visited by Mr. David MacRitchie and Mr. H. T. Crofton, the joint author with Dr. Bath Smart of the admirable Dialect of the English Gipsies (1875); the former wrote an excellent article about them in Chambers’s Journal for September 1886. These Gypsies were not Caldarari, though some of them were coppersmiths (designated as ‘chaudronniers’); others were builders, bricklayers, and agriculturists. They were typical Gypsies in physique, but not in apparel, ‘absolutely free from the vice of drunkenness,’ but most inveterate beggars. Their chief spokesman ‘was quite an accomplished linguist, and could speak Greek, Russian, Roumanian, and two or three other dialects of south-eastern Europe. The curious thing was, that he never once included in his list his own mother tongue, the speech of the Gypsy race. Neither would he admit that he was a Ziganka, not for a long time, at anyrate; but subsequently both he and his comrades answered to the name of Roum, and the cigar was no longer bōn’ but lásho.’ After stopping some time at Liverpool, these Gypsies crossed over to Hull, but neither there could they get passage to America; about a year later, so an English Gypsy informed me, a showman was exhibiting them, or some of them, through Yorkshire. Their subsequent fate is unknown to me; perhaps they are in process of absorption into English Gypsydom.

Eastern Gypsies in Galloway.

I thought at first it must have been some of this band whom my friend Mr. Robert Burns, the Edinburgh artist, met in Galloway in 1895; but his account of that meeting, written at my request, dispels that notion:—‘Two years ago, while walking with my wife near Kirkcudbright, I met a large troop of Gypsies, of a type quite different from any I had formerly seen. The first to appear round a corner was a tall, swarthy man leading a brown bear. My dog, a big powerful beast, immediately made a rush for the bear, but I managed to catch him in time. On seeing me holding the dog, the man came up, and, in very broken English, said that the bear would not hurt the dog. I explained that my fears were not for the dog but for the bear, an undersized, emaciated beast, and strongly muzzled. By this time we were surrounded by the whole troop, numbering, I should think, sixteen or seventeen, all begging from the “pretty lady” and “kind gentleman,” which seemed to be about all the English they knew. A good-looking young woman, with a baby on her back, asked me in French if I understood that language. I said I did, and asked her where they came from. “From Spain.” Then she spoke Spanish also? “Oh! yes, and German, and other languages as well.” I tried her with a few sentences in German and Spanish, and found that she spoke both languages fluently, although with an accent which made it difficult to understand her. While we were talking, the men, not having stopped, were a considerable distance off. So I gave the woman some silver, while my wife distributed pennies among the children, and with many smiles and thanks they started off to join the others. They were very dark in colour, like Hindoos; the men and the older women very aquiline in feature, some of the younger girls really beautiful, with lithe graceful figures; and all without exception had splendid teeth. Their dress, though ragged and dirty, suggested Eastern Europe rather than Spain; some cheap brass and silver ornaments seemed to point in the same direction. They had two ponies with panniers, full of babies, cabbages, empty strawberry baskets, and other odds and ends; one of the ponies had a headstall of plaited cord similar to those used in Hungary. I saw them several times about Kirkcudbright and Gatehouse-on-Fleet; and from mental studies painted the head exhibited in the R.S.A. Exhibition of 1896.’

These must have been Ursári, or bear-wards, and recent arrivals in Britain; but what were they doing in that remote corner of Galloway, in Billy Marshall’s old kingdom? Frampton Boswell, an English Gypsy of my acquaintance, met the very same band, I fancy, near Glasgow in 1896; and they were perhaps the foreign Gypsies encamped at Dunfermline in the autumn of 1897—I was lying ill at the time in Edinburgh. Almost certainly they were identical with ‘a little band of Roumanian Ursári’ whom Mr. Sampson met in Lancashire in the latter half of 1897, and who were ‘travelling in English-Gypsy vans which they had bought in this country. They stopped for a month or more at Wavertree, quite close to us, and I saw a good deal of them. The first time, crossing a field by night and expecting to meet with some of the English breed, I stumbled among the six unmuzzled bears, chained to the wheels of the vans, and took them for large dogs till their grunts undeceived me; fortunately I got off with whole legs. They spoke a jumble of tongues—some Slavonic dialect (brat = brother), bad French, Italian, no German, and little English; but with the help of Rómani and scraps of other tongues we held some instructive conversations. Their young girls were beautiful, half-clad, savage, but the older women ugly as sin. When I first spoke to them, they replied to a question in Rómani with an Italian denial:—‘We are not Gypsies, we are (✠) Christianos.’

Oh for three years of health, a thousand pounds sterling, say, and a good capacity for wine and languages! I would pass those three years at Temesvar and Ciboure, and also perhaps in Morocco; at their close I should hold the key to Mr. Wentworth Webster’s problem. Fifty years hence, very likely, there will no longer be any problem left to solve; the ancient corporation of the Caldarari will have undergone dissolution.

Gypsy Folk-tales.

Given then this wandering race, from time immemorial established in Europe, but emigrants originally from India: the interest of their folk-tales, if folk-tales indeed they have, will surely at once be apparent to every student of Indo-European folklore. Yet folklorists as a body seem strangely ignorant of the existence of Rómani folk-tales, of the fact that not a few Gypsies are even professional story-tellers.

Campbell of Islay.

In enumerating the sources of his Gaelic stories (i. p. xxiv.), Campbell gives (a) a West Country fisherman; (b) an old dame of seventy; (c) a pretty lass; or (d) ‘it is an old wandering vagabond of a tinker who has no roof but the tattered covering of his tent.… There he lies, an old man past eighty, who has been a soldier, and “has never seen a school”; too proud to beg, too old to work; surrounded by boxes and horn spoons; with shaggy hair and naked feet, as perfect a nomad as the wildest Lapp or Arab in the whole world.’ etc. Campbell gives four stories of tinker origin, our Nos. 73–76. To them and to their tellers I shall revert in my Introduction.

Dr. F. Müller.

In Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Rom-Sprache (Vienna, 1869), Dr. Friedrich Müller, the ‘leading representative of linguistic ethnology,’ published five Hungarian-Gypsy stories in the original Rómani, with an interlinear German translation. Taken down by Herr Fialowski from the recitation of a Hungarian-Gypsy soldier, Šipoš Janoš, quartered at Vienna, these stories are wholly void of literary merit. They are rambling and disconnected, sometimes all but unintelligible, and often excessively gross. At the same time they are genuine folk-tales; the soldier was trying to remember stories he had heard, not weaving them out of his own imagination. Four of them offer variants of Gypsy stories in other collections; and of these four I give summaries on pp. 19, 34, 48, 174, and 208. The fifth, ‘The Wallachian Gypsy,’ after six most Rabelaisian pages, passes on to a Tannhäuser episode. For the Gypsy, having murdered his father, plants on his grave the stick he killed him with. ‘And that stick began to blossom. That son went about on his knees for four-and-twenty years, and carried water in his mouth. And every evening the tree blossomed, and every evening grew a red apple.… And once the king came that way,… and as he went to pluck an apple, “Stay,” said the Gypsy, “don’t seize it so, but shake the tree, and then they will all turn into doves.” The king shook the tree, and all the apples then turned into doves. Up they flew, and the poor son’s father arose.’ The Gypsy then goes in quest of the Otter King (Vídrisko Kírāli). A king gives him a filly that can speak. On the way he is fed by a swineherd (one pail of wine and a whole swine) and a neatherd (an ox and two pails); he then meets a shepherd, overcomes a wether, and stabs the shepherd at his own request. Come to the Otter King, he eats his grapes, empties the biggest barrel of wine, wrestles with the Otter King on the Golden Bridge, and turns him into stone. He inquires of the king’s daughter, ‘Where is thy father’s strength?’ ‘My father’s strength is underneath the bridge. There is a besom; draw out a twig; and if thou with this, if thou with this wilt strike all the stones, then they will all turn into men.’ After trying once vainly to destroy him, the maiden pushes him into a fountain. But he ups with the fountain, and puts it and a tree under the window of a king, to whom he becomes turkey-keeper. A lady falls with child by him. He is caught, and there is a trial. She has had other lovers, and she is adjudged to him to whom she shall throw a red apple. She throws it to the Gypsy. So they marry and have children.—A nightmare kind of story this, which I can match from no other collection; still it offers numerous analogies, e.g. for the apple-tree, to Hahn, i. 70 and my No. 17; for turning men into stone, to Hahn, i. 172 and ii. 47; for the besom, to Hahn, ii. 294; and for throwing the apple, to Hahn, i. 94, 104, and ii. 56; also Bernhard Schmidt’s Griechische Märchen, pp. 85, 228, and Reinhold Köhler in Orient und Occident, ii. 304–6.

Dr. Paspati.

Alexander G. Paspati, M.D., who died at Athens in the Christmas week of 1891, practised long as a doctor at Constantinople, and was an eminent Byzantine antiquary. His Études sur les Tchinghianés ou Bohémiens de l’Empire Ottoman (Cont. 1870, 652 pp.), is one of the very best works that we have on the Rómani language. It is largely based on Turkish-Gypsy folk-tales, of which Dr. Paspati seems to have made a huge collection, but six only of which are published by him as an appendix (pp. 594–629), in the original Rómani with a French translation. Two of these six stories—‘Baldpate,’ No. 2, and ‘The Riddle,’ No. 3—he got from a sedentary Gypsy, ‘Léon Zafiri, middle-aged, by profession mower, musician, and story-teller. Gifted with a prodigious memory, this man has repeated to me a great number of folk-tales (contes fabuleux), portions of which I have inserted in the text of my vocabulary. To test his memory I have made him repeat some of these stories, and he has retold them word for word, making only very slight changes. During the long nights of winter his brother Gypsies invite him to tell his tales, which he also translates into Turkish with extreme facility. I have one whose recital would occupy two hours. These stories are very old. He has heard them from various members of his race, and has been able to retain them in his marvellous memory. I have written these stories at his dictation. I have several volumes of them among my papers. Several were told by his grandfather, long since dead, who was also a story-teller. In these stories, with their mixture of truth and fable, I have not hitherto met any token either of their Indian origin or of an ancient faith. I say that these stories are old, for one finds in them words such as manghín, shéhi, etc., which to-day are quite forgotten by the Tchinghianés. This illiterate man is not only familiar with the dialect of the Sedentary Gypsies, but he knows also that of the Nomads, in whose midst he sings his songs and tells his stories. One is sorry to see a man of such intelligence, so superior to the mass of his race, dragging out a pitiful existence and clad in rags’ (pp. 34–35).

They are not very lively reading, these little scraps; still, they considerably extend our knowledge of Tchinghiané folk-tales. Of the six stories given in full by Paspati I have had to omit two. One of these, told by Christian nomads in the mixed style, is mixed indeed, more incoherent than the tale of the Great Panjandrum, as witness this sample:—‘The godfather sees her with flowers on her head. Song, “The wolf will eat the lamb; The wolf will eat the turkey; The cat hit the bear; A stranger was alarmed.” ’ The other story, told by one of the wild Zapáris, opens with a boon granted by an old man to the youngest of a king’s five sons, to possess all the holes in the country. ‘He went; in the forest he went; he found a hole. He stooped down over the hole. “Come out of the hole, whoever is inside.” A woman came out; he asked her, “What are you doing down there?” “There are two wolves; I feed them.” “Feed them well; God be with you.” “And with you also.” Again he went and went; he found a hole, and stooped down over that hole. “Come out of the hole.” Out came a blackamoor,’ etc. It is not a bad opening, but the story wanders off into drivel and obscenity. Even of the four tales I do give, one, the ‘Story of the Bridge,’ is valuable solely for its theme, of the master-builder Manóli and his wife; if it is as old as it is corrupt, it should be of hoary antiquity. But the three others are really good folk-tales, versions of ‘The Grateful Dead,’ ‘Faithful John,’ and Campbell of Islay’s ‘Knight of Riddles.’ As always wherever possible, my translations are made direct from the original Rómani.

Dr. Barbu Constantinescu.

Probe de Limba si Literatura Tiganilor din România, by Dr. Barbu Constantinescu (Bucharest, 1878; 112 pp.), is an admirable collection of seventy-five Roumanian-Gypsy songs and thirteen folk-tales, in the original Rómani, with a Roumanian translation. The thirteen tales were got from thirteen different Gypsies, and naturally they vary in merit, the best to my thinking being ‘The Red King and the Witch,’ ‘The Vampire,’ and ‘The Prince and the Wizard.’ I have given eleven of them, with full annotations; of ‘The Stolen Ox’ and ‘The Prince who ate Men’ there are summaries on pp. 66 and 219. Dr. Barbu Constantinescu, who was latterly a professor at Crajova, is, I learn, dead; he must have known Rómani thoroughly, and may have left large collections.

Miklosich.

In part iv. of his great work, Ueber die Mundarten und die Wanderungen der Zigeuner Europa’s (Vienna, 1874), Dr. Franz von Miklosich published fifteen Gypsy folk-tales and nine songs from the Bukowina, in the original Rómani, with an interlinear Latin translation. They were collected by Professor Leo Kirilowicz, of Czernowicz, but when, where, or from whom is not told; and they, alone of Gypsy folk-tales, have been utilised by M. Emmanuel Cosquin to illustrate his admirable Contes de Lorraine (2 vols. 1886). I have given them all in full, except ‘The Rivals,’ part only of which is cited under No. 48, p. 181. ‘Tropsyn,’ ‘The Enchanted City,’ and ‘The Jealous Husband’ are perhaps the best; the last has a special interest through its relation to Cymbeline. In his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Zigeunermundarten (part iv., Vienna 1878), Miklosich published three more folk-tales, communicated by Professor Kirilowicz, Herr J. Kluch, and Dr. M. Gaster—the first a Lying Story from the Bukowina (No. 35), the second, ‘The Three Brothers,’ from the Hungarian Carpathians (No. 31), and the third, a mere fragment, from Roumania. This fragment is on the familiar theme of an emperor who till old age has had no heir; then his empress bears him a son; but just as the child is being shown to the people, two eagles carry it off. ‘Men,’ cries the empress, ‘if you will find my boy, I will become your servant, to wait on you, to wash your feet, to drink the water they are washed in, to quit my greatness, to make you king in my stead, if only you will find my boy.’ After which the story becomes hopeless nonsense, then suddenly stops—I fancy the Gypsy story-teller had got too drunk to continue.

Wlislocki.

Märchen und Sagen der Transilvanischen Zigeuner (Berlin, 1886, 157 pages), by Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki, differs from all other Continental collections of Rómani folk-tales in this, that its sixty-three stories are published for their intrinsic interest, not solely as linguistic curiosities. They are given in German only, not in the original. Hence they are open to a suspicion of having been here and there touched up, a suspicion somewhat confirmed in the rare cases where the original is appended in a footnote, as on p. 88. They are interesting, but only as a ‘restored’ building may be interesting; one doubts, one can never feel quite sure of anything. At the same time, I believe that such ‘improvements’ apply solely to the language, not to the subject-matter, of these stories. Their general genuineness is attested by their occasional lacunæ, as in ‘Godfather Death,’ which is closely identical with Grimm’s No. 44, but lacks the entire episode of the sick princess. Besides, except that his work is dedicated to Liebrecht, Dr. von Wlislocki gives no indication of acquaintance with the subject of folk-tales, whilst he has approved himself a master of Rómani by his Grammar of the Dialect of the Transylvanian Gypsies (Leipzig, 1884). He tells us in the preface to his Märchen that for several months of the summer of 1883 he wandered with a band of tented Gypsies through Transylvania and south-east Hungary, and that during his wanderings he collected these sixty-three stories, every one of which he was careful to verify from the lips of a second member of the race. His little work is easily accessible to every folklorist, so to the folklorists I leave the task of analysing its stories in detail, premising merely that, like their predecessors, they offer numerous analogies to non-Gypsy folk-tales, but that fourteen of them bear a distinctively Gypsy character, especially Nos. 15, 24, 31, 36, 51, 55. Haltrich also gives some Transylvanian-Gypsy stories (Zur Volkskunde der siebenbürgischen Sachsen, Vienna, 1885); and Vladislav Kornel, Ritter von Zielinski, contributed four Hungarian-Gypsy ones to the Gypsy Lore Journal for April 1890, pp. 65–73.

Dr. R. von Sowa.

Die Mundart der Slovakischen Zigeuner (Göttingen, 1887), by Dr. Rudolf von Sowa, of Brünn, is based on nineteen Slovak-Gypsy stories which he collected at Teplicz in 1884–85, and nine of which are given in the original Rómani without a translation. Dr. von Sowa also contributed four Gypsy folk-tales—Slovak and Moravian—to the Gypsy Lore Journal; and the Bohemian-Gypsy story of ‘The Three Dragons’ he sent me in manuscript. His stories have a high value for the purposes of comparison, but are inferior as stories to those of several other collections. I have given eight of them—Nos. 12, 19, 22, 41, 42, 43, 44, 60.

Dr. Kopernicki.

Isidore Kopernicki, M.D. (1825–91), published in 1872 a German monograph on Gypsy craniology, and, called from Bucharest to Cracow in 1870, collected thirty Polish-Gypsy folk-tales in 1875–77. A year or two before his death he put out a prospectus of a projected work on Rómani stories and songs, with a French translation; but the work never found a publisher. Six, however, of his stories appeared in the Gypsy Lore Journal, and are reproduced here, Nos. 45–50. They are one and all so admirable as stories and valuable as folklore that I cannot but hope some folklore society or some individual folklorist may purchase and publish the entire collection—Madame Kopernicki, I believe, is still a resident of Cracow.

John Roberts.

Twenty to thirty years ago I knew hundreds of Gypsies in most parts of England and Wales. But the Rómani dialect was in those days my all-in-all; I would walk or ride thirty miles, and feel richly rewarded if I came back with two or three new words, such as mormússi, midwife, or taltoráiro, crow. I knew little or nothing about folklore, and cared less; the few stray odds and ends of it that I picked up among the people are scattered mostly through my In Gypsy Tents (Edinb. 1880). At Virginia Water, in 1872, I remember old Matty Cooper telling me how the plaice went about calling out, ‘I’m the King of the Fishes,’ which was why her mouth was made crooked (cf. Grimm’s No. 172, ‘The Sole’); and from a Boswell in, I think, 1875, I got the lying story of ‘Happy Boz’ll,’ which I give here, No. 36. But my one great find was my lighting on the Welsh-Gypsy harper, John Roberts (1815–94), of Newtown in Montgomeryshire. In Gypsy Tents contains a great deal about him and by him (pp. 78–81, 94–99, 149–158, 197–216, 269–278, 290–294, 299–319, 372–377); here, then, it may suffice to say that, though not a full-blooded Gypsy, he could speak Rómani, yes, and write Rómani, as no other Gypsy I have ever met at home or on the Continent. I know, indeed, of no other instance where the teller of folk-tales has also been able himself to transcribe them. He wrote out for me the two long folk-tales reprinted here (Nos. 54 and 55), and he had a wealth of others: I fear that many of them have perished with him. He was one of the finest of Welsh harpers; he spoke Welsh, English, and Rómani with equal fluency; and he was a man besides of rare intelligence. His tales, he would have it, were all derived from the Arabian Nights, ‘leastwise if it was not from my poor old mother, or else from my grandmother, and she was a wonderful woman for telling stories.’

Mr. John Sampson.

‘On the slopes of Cader I have laboured for days together taking down these things in a sort of phrenzy. No work could be more exhausting. To note every accent, to follow the story, and to keep the wandering wits of my Rómani raconteur to the point, all helped to make it trying work. For days together I have heard no English spoken, the Woods always talking Rómani, and the Gentiles Welsh. It is as well I did so at the time, for Matthew Wood has cleared his mountain of trees, and departed, God knows whither. Three journeys into Wales, and many letters to post-offices and police-stations, have failed to find him. Nor can I chance upon his mother again. Matthew got these stories from his grandmother, Black Ellen, who, he says, knew two hundred stories, many of them so long that their narration occupied four or five hours. In listening to these tales, I think what struck me most was the severity of their style, reminiscent of Paspati’s and other Continental collections. A single word serves often as a sentence—”Chalé,” they ate; “Ratí,” it was night. The latter beats for compression the Virgilian “Nox erat.” … I have added lately to my tales to the number of five or six, taken down chiefly in English from a South Welsh Gypsy named Cornelius Price.… I have Cornelius’s pedigree somewhere among my papers. The Prices are a South Wales family, not of the purest descent, who entered Wales from Hereford some generations ago. Some of them intermarried with the Ingrams. Cornelius is a son of Amos Price, from whom my old tinker Murray got most of his Rómani lore, including the version of the old ballad ‘Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave’ which I sent to MacRitchie, and which he sent to Professor Child. It has beautiful lines, like—

“She lifted up his dying head,

And kissed his cheek and chin,”

side by side with others like—

“And when he came to his brother dear,

He was in a hell of a fright.”

It is printed in Child’s collection. Cornelius got his stories from Nebuchadnēzar Price, his uncle. I met him at Wavertree, near Liverpool, but he has since left for Chester way, returning south. He is a man of middle age, or rather younger, perhaps, say thirty-five, a pleasant, harum-scarum fellow. His younger brother, he tells me, knows many more tales than he himself.… Some of the best tales Price forgets, or only remembers interesting fragments. Such as a story of a bull who fights a —— query, what? If he conquers, he tells the hero, the stream will flow down to him blood one side only, but, if he is defeated, blood each side. The bull is defeated, and, following his instructions, the hero cuts a thong from his tail upwards, finds in his body a “Sword of Swiftness,” and makes a belt of the hide. Of what tale is this a fragment? Cornelius assures me that his youngest brother knows thirty to fifty very long tales.… Had I time, I believe I could collect hundreds of such tales from English and Welsh Gypsies.’

(Three or four years ago I found myself in a library—I would not for worlds say where—alone with a complete set of the forty Reports of the Challenger Expedition. I drew out a volume reverently—its pages had never been opened. Tastes differ, and I own that myself I should be quite as much interested by the discovery (say) of a Welsh-Gypsy version of the ‘Grateful Dead,’ as by eight hundred and odd pages on the ‘Abdominal Secretions of the Lower Gasteropoda.’ Nay, I would even venture to suggest that a fraction, a very small fraction, of the money yearly devoted to the Endowment of Research by government, by our colleges, and by individual generosity, might well be apportioned to the collecting and preserving of English and Welsh Gypsy folk-tales. Every year will make the task harder; but, as it is, I believe Mr. Sampson could bag the whole lot in a couple of three months’ summer holidays. Holidays, quotha! I wonder what Mr. Sampson would say to my notion of holidays.)

Campbell of Islay.

Of the four stories which I cite (No. 73–76) from J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols. 1860–62), three were told by John MacDonald, travelling tinker, and the fourth by his old father. ‘John,’ Hector Urquhart writes, ‘wanders all over the Highlands, and lives in a tent with his family. He can neither read nor write. He repeats some of his stories by heart fluently, and almost in the same words. I have followed his recitation as closely as possible, but it was exceedingly difficult to keep him stationary for any length of time.’ To which Campbell himself adds:—‘The tinker’s comments on “The Brown Bear of the Green Glen” I got from the transcriber. John himself is a character. He is about fifty years of age. His father, an old soldier, is alive and about eighty; and there are numerous younger branches; and they were all encamped under the root of a tree in a quarry close to Inverary, at Easter 1859. The father tells many stories, but his memory is failing. The son told me several, and I have a good many of them written down. They both recite; they do not simply tell the story, but act it with changing voice and gesture, as if they took an interest in it, and entered into the spirit and fun of the tale. They belong to the race of “Cairds,” and are as much nomads as the gipsies are. The father, to use the son’s expression, “never saw a school.” He served in the 42d in his youth. One son makes horn spoons, and does not know a single story; the other is a sporting character, a famous fisherman, who knows all the lochs and rivers in the Highlands, makes flies, and earns money in summer by teaching Southerns to fish. His ambition is to become an under-keeper’ (i. 174–5).

There are three points to be specially noticed here. First, if I mistake not, these two tinkers, father and son, are the only Gaelic story-tellers whom Campbell describes as reciting and acting their stories; he repeats the same of the son in a passage which I quote on p. 288. Secondly, the father told ‘many stories,’ but one does not learn what they were, except that Campbell got from him a version of ‘Osean after the Feen’ (ii. 106), that the son ‘argued points’ in the story of ‘Conal Crovi’ (i. 142), and that he knew the story of the ‘Shifty Lad,’ though not well enough to repeat it (i. 353). ‘Many stories’ should mean more than these three and the four of our text. Lastly, these MacDonalds are said to ‘belong to the race of “Cairds,” and to be as much nomads as the gipsies are.’ But the question arises, Are they not Gypsies, or half-breed Gypsies, or quarter-breed Gypsies at any rate? To the Gypsy Lore Journal for January 1891, pp. 319–20, D. Fearon Ranking, LL.D., contributed this paper:—

Boat-dwelling Tinkers.

‘I spent the month of August this year (1890) at Crinan Harbour, in Argyllshire, and there came for a few moments across a family of “Tinklers,” who are, I fancy, worth following up for the sake of getting from them a stock of words. I was one morning on my way to the post-office at Crinan, and, lying at the slip in front of the office, I saw a good-sized boat, which I knew did not belong to the place. I crossed the road, and went down to see who the owners were. To my surprise, I found they were a party of “Tinklers.” On questioning them they told me that they always went about in this manner, sailing from place to place on the West Coast and among the Islands, and making and mending pots and pans. They had just put in for provisions, and were on the point of sailing for Scarba. The boat was a good-sized fishing smack, three-quarter decked, rigged, if I remember rightly, with a big lug-sail and jib, and a small lug aft, but on this point I am not quite certain. The party consisted of three men and two women, with two or three children. They were stunted in appearance, and quite young; the women reddish-haired, the men rather darker.

‘One of the men suddenly said, “But we have another language, which I do not think any one knows but ourselves; it is not in any books.” “What do you call a ‘boat’ in your language?” I said. To my great astonishment, he replied, “Bero.” On my then asking for the words for “man,” “woman,” and “child,” he gave mush or gairo, monisha, and chavo. Feeling now tolerably sure of my ground, I said, “Kushto bero se duvo.” He stared at me as if I had been a ghost, and, on my continuing with a few more words, he called to one of the women in the boat and said, “Come here, I never saw anything like this. Here is a gentleman who knows our language as well as we know it ourselves.” I continued asking the names of various common objects, such as “fire,” “water,” the names of animals, parts of the body, etc., and soon noticed that for each they had two or three names, one being always good “Rommanis,” the other, I presume, “Shelta.” But my surprise was greatest when, on asking the name for a “hen,” the answer was “moorghee,” and then, as an afterthought, “kanni.” Now, can any one tell me where they got this word “moorghee” from? I have never met with it among any “Rommani foki” of my acquaintance, but know it only as the common Hindustani name for a fowl. Is it an old word which has been lost by others, but retained by this family? Or have they picked it up from some one of their number who has been in India soldiering?

‘Another surprise was in store for me. On asking them where they got this language from, one of the men said, “We got it from our grandfather. He could speak it much better than we can,” and then volunteered the information that this grandfather was a keeper to the Duke of Argyll, and had supplied Campbell of Islay with many of the Sgeulachdan in his Highland Tales. This must be either the John M’Donald, travelling tinker, referred to by Mr. MacRitchie in his article on the “Irish Tinkers and their Language” (Oct. 1889, p. 354), or a relation of his. An account of this family will be found in the notes to the tale of the “Brown Bear of the Green Glen” (Popular Tales, vol. i. pp. 174–175). It mentions that the father had served in the Forty-Second. Had he brought back this word moorghee with him from India? One of the sons is mentioned as being a keen sportsman. No hint is given, however, of their knowing any language but Gaelic. It would probably have astonished Campbell of Islay to find that they were masters of four tongues—Gaelic, Shelta, English, and Rommanis. It may be noticed that the accounts of occupation do not quite tally, as these tinklers distinctly stated that their grandfather was one of Argyll’s keepers. I should like to know whether any of the sons did actually hold such a post. This is all I could learn in an interview of, at the most, twenty minutes.’

Kounavine.

Lastly, in the Gypsy Lore Journal for April and July 1890, were two long articles by Dr. A. B. Elysseeff—‘Kounavine’s Materials for the Study of the Gypsies.’ According to these, Michael Ivanovitch Kounavine (1820–81) studied medicine at Moscow, and then having passed as doctor, for the thirty-five years 1841–76 wandered from Gypsy camp to Gypsy camp in Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia. Eight of those years were passed amongst the Gypsies of Germany, Austria, Southern France, Italy, England, and Spain; twelve amongst those of Asia Minor, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Iran, Hindustan, and the Deccan; ten amongst Russian Gypsies; and then from the Caucasus ‘the indefatigable traveller followed the transition of the European Gypsies into those of Kurdistan, and all along the Ural Mountains into those of Central Asia and Turan, on this occasion revisiting India and the ranges of Tian-Shan and the Himalayas.’ Meanwhile he collected an ‘immense store of materials, consisting of 123 tales, 80 traditions and legends, 62 ritual songs, and 120 smaller products of Gypsy poetry.… In the ancient legends the mythological elements assert themselves most strongly, and the characteristic features of the Hindu mythology are there so evident, that even the names in these tales recall the analogous divinities of the Hindu theology. These are Baramy, the proto-divinity, Jandra, the sun-god, Laki, Matta, Anromori, and others, in which one cannot fail to recognise the Hindu Brama, Indra, Lakshmi, Máta (Prithik, earth-mother), as well as the Zendic name of Ariman.… In the traditions and historical narratives one meets with classic names of towns known to the Greek geographers, such as Batala, Pourini, Espadi, Rikoi, Bikin, and Babili, in which it is not difficult to recognise the ancient towns Pattala, Poura, Aspadana (Ispahan), Rhagæ, Beikind, and Babylon, cited by Arrian and other historians and geographers.’

These are the merest pickings from Dr. Kounavine’s ‘colossal’ collections, which perished, alas! with him somewhere in Siberia, and are known to us only through an elaborate abstract drawn up in 1878 by Dr. Elysseeff, since himself also dead. First printed in the Transactions of the Russian Geographical Society (1882), that abstract, thanks to Dr. Kopernicki, appeared in English in the Gypsy Lore Journal, where it occupied twenty-five pages. It was quite right it should appear there; still, I cannot feel absolutely certain that there ever was any Dr. Kounavine at all. If there was, I am certain that nine-tenths of the discoveries claimed for him are the merest moonshine. To maintain that the Gypsies of England, France, Spain, and Italy arrived at their present habitats from Africa by way of Sicily, is, as has been shown, to evince a crass ignorance of the Rómani language. Equally absurd is it to maintain that ‘every Gypsy dialect contains a large number of words of non-Aryan origin: Aramaic, Semitic, and even Mongol words form 25 per cent. of the Gypsy vocabulary taken in its largest sense.’ For this implies that Aramaic is non-Semitic, as though one should speak of Gaelic and Celtic, or of German and Teutonic. Again, what of the sketch-map, according to which Dr. Kounavine seems to have found ‘fragmentary and confused traces of a primitive mythology’ somewhere about Newtown in Montgomeryshire and round the Cambridgeshire Wash? Newtown is a Welsh-Gypsy centre (I had shown it be such in 1880); but unquestionably its Gypsies would have retained some recollection of a visit from a mysterious Rómani-speaking foreigner, even after the lapse of thirty or forty years.

Theory as to Gypsy Folk-tales.

So there the folklorists have all that is essential—or rather all that I can give of the essential—for the right understanding of the following seventy-six folk-tales. And there I should have been quite content to leave them, did I not wish to disavow the theory imputed to me mistakenly by my friend, Mr. Joseph Jacobs. In his More English Fairy Tales (1894), p. 232, he speaks of ‘Mr. Hindes Groome’s contention (in Transactions Folk-Lore Congress) for the diffusion of all folk-tales by means of Gypsies as colporteurs.’ The paper I read before the Folklore Congress of 1891 was not on folk-tales at all, but on English popular superstitions; I certainly never contended that their diffusion was solely due to the Gypsies. Whilst as to Gypsy folk-tales, the first thing I ever wrote about them was forty-three lines in the Encyclopædia Britannica (vol. x. 1879, p. 615), which, with but forty stories to go by, concluded:—‘At present our information is far too scanty to warrant any definite conclusion; but, could it once be shown that the Asiatic possess the same stories as the European Gypsies, it might be necessary to admit that Europe owes a portion of its folklore to the Gypsies.’ And the last thing I wrote on the subject was twenty-seven lines in Chambers’s Encyclopædia (vol. v. 1892, p. 489), and they wound up:—‘According to Benfey, Reinhold Köhler, Ralston, Cosquin, Clouston, and other folklorists, most of the popular stories of Europe are traceable to Indian sources. But how? by what channels? One channel, perhaps, was the Gypsies.’

Gypsy Variants.

Unique Features.

An absolutely unique story or incident is a very rare find in folklore. A few stories in the present collection I have not been able to match, e.g. ‘The Three Princesses and the Unclean Spirit’ (No. 10), ‘The Red King and the Witch’ (14), ‘The Prince and the Wizard’ (15), ‘Pretty-face’ (29), ‘A Girl who was sold to the Devil’ (46), and ‘The Black Dog of the Wild Forest’ (72). Then as to incidents, I have met with no non-Gypsy parallel to the somersault that in Gypsy stories almost invariably precedes a transformation (cf. footnote 2 on p. 16). I have met with none to the striking ordeal in ‘Mare’s Son’ (No. 20):—